Torchlight is a splendidly solid action RPG with more features than one would expect.

User Rating: 8 | Torchlight PC

INTRO:

Having business interests mix with game development may have removed some game designers' desire to stay at where they were, but fortunately for followers of the kinds of games that they make, they did not leave their passion behind at their last job.

Such is the case for the people at Runic Games, who used their experience and knowledge to create Torchlight, a simply-named fantasy game with surprisingly sophisticated and long-lasting gameplay. Of course, it can be argued that it is neither entirely original nor flawless, but Runic Games has had the wisdom to accommodate any misgivings by making Torchlight to be one of the most modular games around.

PREMISE:

At first glance, Torchlight may seem to have a premise that is rare among fantasy games.

The fictional world that Torchlight is set in happens to have mysterious minerals that are known as Ember, due to the sometimes otherworldly light that they give off. Ember is apparently magical, having many and often unpredictable permutations. Ember apparently can spread into mundane objects too, such as eyeballs and skulls, effectively preserving them for eternity as well as imparting special magical properties onto them.

Due to the often miraculous properties of Ember, it is highly sought after. It just so happens that one particular town, the titular Torchlight, sits on top of a massive and seemingly near endless source of Ember. Unfortunately, it also happens to be one of the most dangerous places in the world, its underground treasure having attracted the attention of more than just civilized humans.

For better or worse, Ember can also affect people as well. Some are especially sensitive to them, and these individuals would find themselves going onto the path of alchemy, witchcraft and wizardry, all of which are careers that make extensive use of Ember.

Unfortunately, Ember also has a tendency to somehow become corrupted, which in turn inexorably poisons what it infiltrates. In the case of affected people, it either maddens them with mutation, or drives them into desperate searches for cures. Even those who are not sickened by it is fascinated by its mutable, highly magical nature, luring them to tamper with Ember in increasingly risky ways.

One of the individuals in the latter group has come to Torchlight to seek the truth behind Ember's fickle nature. He is hardly the first to do so, but his visit apparently has stirred enough trouble that the player characters have decided to come over to investigate.

What would unfold is a tragic tale of treachery and hardship, but it also happens to include clichéd tropes of ancient evil awakening to destroy the world.

PLAYER CHARACTERS:

The player characters are introduced after the overarching plot. There are canonically only three heroes/heroines in Torchlight, but for purposes of gameplay, each of them is considered a class and has been rendered nameless so that players can create characters that have no consequence on the canon of Torchlight.

Although the three classes have different skills and advantages, all of them can be developed so that they are skilled in melee, ranged or magical combat – preferably specializing in only one of these, as hybrid builds tend to be poor. That said, the observant player may notice that specialized builds may resemble certain character archetypes that have been seen in other fantasy action RPGs.

The Destroyer is the archetypal brute of the three. Most of the successful character builds for the Destroyer gives him plenty of health to take some painful hits while he is dishing out damage and/or doing crowd control.

The melee route is perhaps the best for the Destroyer. However, ranged weapons are still useful for him, especially for hitting individual enemies from afar so that they come over to him instead of him over to them. As for his magical capabilities, most of these involve the exuding of auras.

The Vanquisher is the archetypal rogue character. She can be developed into a wholly ranged character or a quick-footed melee one, but in either build, she is not likely to have high health reserves to go with her high damage output.

The Alchemist is the archetypal magician. In just about any successful build for him, he has high mana reserves to sustain his spell-casting. As for the unique spells that he can throw out, many of them are de-buffs and the creation of minions that would take the hurt for him in battle, which is much appreciated, as the Alchemist is typically the frailest of the three classes.

There are four attributes to any player character: Strength, Dexterity, Magic and Defense. These work a lot like the attributes of the same name that have been seen in many, many other fantasy RPGs, so there is nothing surprising to be had.

As to be expected from an action RPG, every level that a player character gains grants a handful of points that he/she can spend on attributes and one point for the improvement of skills. However, there is one more way to gain skill points, as will be described later.

SKILL DESIGNS:

Most of the skills that the three classes have in Torchlight would be familiar to veterans of action RPGs. There are damage-over-time attacks, alpha-strike attacks, de-buffs, auras, buffs, minion-summoning spells and such others that would not seem revolutionary.

There are some skills that are interesting amalgams of tropes though. For example, the Destroyer's (perhaps inaccurately named) Shadow Bowman skill is a hybrid of a buff and a turret; a ghostly form sticks out from his back for some time, chucking javelins at any enemy in range.

Another example is the Vanquisher's Ricochet skill, which has the undocumented effect of penetrating through multiple enemies in a row in addition to its eponymous ricocheting property. Of course, this can be considered a design oversight that perhaps made this skill more powerful than it should be.

Nevertheless, it can be satisfying to learn about the nuances and side benefits of skills and then incorporate them into character builds.

If there is an issue with the designs of skills, it is that the player does not get to see the exact damage that skills would do (which is a design that made it into the sequel). Although most skills do mention how their attributes are calculated, the calculation is left for the player to figure out as it and its results are hidden from view (at least not without the use of mods).

Higher-level skills have increasing mana costs for their usage. This balancing design, which is nothing new, requires the player to think about investing some resources into improving the character's mana reserves.

The prerequisites that the player needs to fulfill in order to be allowed to invest points into skills are the level and attributes of the player character; these are typical but understandable requirements.

Unfortunately, there is no method to reimburse skill points and reset skills in the vanilla version of the game. This feature has to be achieved through the use of mods (though one of these particular mods is made by Runic Games itself).

The three classes have a few skills that are common to all of them. These skills happen to be quite utilitarian, so the fact that all three have them would not be a surprise.

For example, Barter and Treasure Hunter contribute to the accumulation of coin and upgrading of gear, so it is always useful if the player does not want to grind too much for that, though this comes at the opportunity cost of spending skill points into combat skills.

Another example is Pet Mastery, which improves the effectiveness of the player character's pet, which will be described later. The Pet will play a huge role in the gameplay throughout any playthrough, so this passive skill will always be useful.

Interestingly, all three classes can dual-wield and have a passive skill just for that. Even the Alchemist can dual-wield wands, which can be an amusing sight.

FAME:

In addition to the usual system of experience points and levels, there is a second system that can be used to gain more skill points.

This system is called "fame". Fame points are understandably obtained from completing quests and defeating huge variants of monsters that have names of their own. Upon achieving the next rank of Fame, the player character gains a skill point that can be spent freely.

However, the expenditure of this skill point is still limited by the prerequisite of character levels.

SPELLS:

Interestingly, Torchlight's approach to implementing spells is to treat them as tools that cannot be improved without disposing and replacing them outright, in that order.

After obtaining a spell scroll, the player can add the spell that is inscribed in that scroll as an additional skill that the player character can use.

"Learned" spells cannot be improved and any player character can only learn so many. "Learned" spells can be "forgotten", effectively discarding them from use. Having to swap out spells of lower levels for the same spells of higher levels can be annoying, but it is unfortunately a necessity.

At least the spells are mostly useful. They are categorized into three types, according to their practical usage: Offensive, Defensive and Charm.

Offensive spells do as they are named for: harm enemies, either directly or indirectly. These include the likes of fireballs and bolts of frost, but also include combat buffs such as Dervish, which increases the attack speeds of player characters. The Offensive spell that players may appreciate the most is Silence, as it prevents enemies from using their special abilities and also happens to hobble their A.I. scripts.

Defensive spells are mainly buffs that impart protection on the player character or otherwise make the player character more durable in other ways. Defensive spells include all the healing spells and buffs to resistances. Some others are more peculiar, such as summoning a creature that actively heals the player character and his/her companions.

Charm spells encompass spells that summon monsters to serve the player temporarily, or charm an enemy or two into fighting on the player's side. Charm spells also include utilitarian spells, such as a spell that identifies unknown items and a spell that creates Town Portals.

Unlike skills, spells have cool-down times that prevent the player from spamming them. This is understandable, because utilitarian spells such as Self-Healing may render other tools, such as Healing Potions in this case, obsolete if they do not have cool-down times.

ADORNMENTS:

There are no less than eight types of pieces of clothing that the player character can wear.

Most of them would be familiar to veterans of RPGs. There are slots for chest armor, footwear, belts, gloves, and headwear, as well as jewellery, of which a character can only wear two rings and a necklace.

Interestingly, shoulder plates are a category of items of their own, separated from chest armor. This is a rare design in RPGs. In Torchlight, this makes gear builds a bit more sophisticated.

WEAPONS (& SHIELDS)

There are quite a number of weapons in the game, though most of these are mainstays of the fantasy RPG genre, so the player should not be expecting anything that is convincingly refreshing.

However, it is worth noting here that there are weapon types that can be paired together as they deal the same kind of damage; one of them would be the single-handed variant, while the other is the two-handed counterpart. This is the case for axes and polearms, maces and staves and pistols and rifles

As for swords, there are both single-handed and two-handed variants.

Among these weapons, the firearms and the wands are perhaps the most interesting of the otherwise typical arsenal of Torchlight. Pistols are short-ranged weapons that pack quite a punch, whereas rifles are practically more powerful but slower versions of bows. Wands are magical pistols, but most of them tend to be oriented towards one type of elemental damage.

In lieu of dual-wielding, the player may choose to use a shield together with a weapon. Every shield has a chance to block incoming attacks that the player could not dodge. Blocked attacks have their damage greatly reduced, or have their damage negated altogether. In addition, shields improve the player character's defence ratings. Such designs for shields are nothing new, of course.

Although a player character may dual-wield weapons, only the one in the right-hand is used for skills that make use of the player's equipped weapons. There are exceptions, such as the Destroyer's very first skill which visibly has him hitting targets with both weapons if he is dual-wielding, but such exceptions are far and few in between.

POTIONS:

Being a fantasy RPG, that there are red potions that represent healing potions and blue potions that represent mana-restoring potions in Torchlight is typical. As the player progresses in the main dungeon, the merchants in the town of Torchlight will make available stronger grades of such potions, commensurate with the increasing challenge.

There are other more special potions to be bought from the merchants, though these only appear later. There are potions that increase chances for critical attacks and armor temporarily, which are useful for tough fights, and a potion for increasing chances of getting better loot.

There are a few other even more special potions with lucrative effects that are rewards from completing quests, so they will not be mentioned here for fear of spoilers.

The duration of the temporary effects of potions is not clear, however, which makes potions more difficult to use than they should be.

FISH & FISHING:

One of the most amusing aspects of gameplay in Torchlight concerns fishing. Throughout dungeon levels that have water and at certain spots in the town of Torchlight, there are fishing spots that are represented by foamy wakes on the surfaces of water.

The player can have his/her character cast a line into a fishing spot to start a quick-time event mini-game, which may not please players who do not like reflex/timing-based, button-pressing gameplay. In fact, the game can sometimes be an annoying tease with the fishing mini-game. Fortunately, for them, fishing is an entirely optional part of the game.

Anyway, if the player can successfully press the button at the right time, he/she gets to reel in a catch; otherwise, he/she comes out empty-handed and has wasted his/her time.

Fish are usually items that are generally given to the player character's pet to alter its form; this will be described further later. For such fish, they conveniently go into a different tab of slots that are reserved just for them. Such a handy design reinforces the notion that fishing is a completely optional endeavour.

There are also fish that act like potions – powerful ones too. For example, the Bearded Fish grants a 25% bonus to armor rating for five minutes when consumed. However, perhaps for purposes of gameplay balance, they occupy regular inventory slots.

Certain very rare fish grants permanent bonuses to the player character's statistics when he/she consumes it (instead of the pet). However, getting such fish is often a matter of luck, though fishing spots in the dungeons seem to give a better chance than the ones in town.

A fishing spot can be fished as many times as the player likes, which can result in some gameplay imbalance if the player has been exceedingly lucky.

GEMS:

Much like so many other fantasy action RPGs, Torchlight has a system of sockets in items and items that go into said sockets. Understandably, most of these are various forms of Ember, or morbid Ember-imbued trinkets like eyeballs and skulls. Typically enough, they are called "gems" in-game.

The gems in Torchlight grant the usual benefits that can be expected from gems in fantasy action RPGs when they are inserted into sockets. The types of benefits are in turn typically associated with colours. For example, the blue colour of the Cold-Ember means that it grants protection against icy harm when placed into gear pieces that are worn or bonus icy damage when placed into weapons.

There is a person in town that can combine pairs of gems of the same grade and type into a gem of a higher grade. The same person can also break down quartets of vendor trash of the same rarity into gems, though the player may want to sell them to obtain gold instead when this is more prudent.

In addition to gems of stable types, there is also Chaos Ember, which has many permutations that have their own names. Chaos Ember gems cannot be combined in any way, but they often have benefits that regular gems do not offer.

Gems that have been inserted into sockets of items cannot be removed easily, as expected. However, there are two particular characters in town that allow the retrieval of gems at the cost of the items that they were inserted into or the removal of every gem in an item to free up its sockets. These are explained in-game as the fees that the (none-too-shady) pair charges.

Although gem-removing or socket-clearing conveniences are not unheard of before Torchlight's debut, they are still rare in fantasy action RPGs, so their inclusion in Torchlight is quite appreciated.

There is a feature in the game that allows players to abuse the use of high-grade gems, as will be described later.

ENCHANTING:

Magical items that the player finds do not have their properties set in stone. They can be somehow improved further by having them "enchanted".

There is an enchanter in town that can infuse magical equipment with more properties, improve existing ones or add sockets; which action that he performs is a matter of luck. He might also do nothing at all, wasting the player's time and money.

Worse, he could fumble and completely eliminate all properties from a magical item and render it mundane; this is a mishap that the game calls "disenchantment", but he will not reimburse the fee that the player paid for his service.

An item of a rarer grade requires higher fees to be enchanted. In addition, every item that has been enchanted will be given a counter that represents the probability of disenchantment; this counter increases by 2% every time the item has been successfully enchanted with positive results.

This makes improving an item a risky proposition, but the observant player may realize that once the player is rolling in gold and does not have anything desirable to spend it on, enchanting items is the only worthwhile activity to sink gold in.

The player may also come across enchanting shrines when romping through the dungeons. These shiny golden edifices can perform one enchantment attempt for free. It does halve the probability of disenchantment, but not completely, so bad luck can still occur.

PET:

The player character starts the game with an animal companion, who will almost always be around to help perform useful things. The choices of animals are purely cosmetic, though it has to be noted here that only the cat (which strongly resembles a lynx) and the dog (which strongly resembles a wolf-hound) are available by default for players who purchased the downloadable versions of the game.

The pet expectedly lingers around the player character, changing positions now and then to depict restlessness. This is not an issue most of the time, but the pet can unwittingly walk into traps and hazards and injure itself if there are levels with these things.

The pet can engage in battle, though it is strictly only a melee combatant that cannot even win battles on its own. At best, they serve as a distraction against enemies, while the player character deals most of the damage.

It has its own health bar, so it can take damage. However, instead of being slain if it loses all of its health, the pet runs about at high speed all over the place, while a disembodied narrator informs the player that the pet is "fleeing".

The pet will regenerate health quickly in this state but will not engage in battle. It can still be injured in this state, but it can never die, though any health that has been regenerated will be reduced, further prolonging its cowardice. The player can force it back into action by healing it, either by using healing spells or dropping healing potions into its part of the user interface until its health breaches the 75% point.

The pet also has a mana bar, which it will use to cast any of the two spells that the player can have it learn by expending spell scrolls on it. However, it will decide on its own when to cast spells; the player cannot direct the pet to cast spells. Fortunately, most of the A.I. scripts that control its spell-casting are quite modest, though most players would have preferred that they were more sophisticated.

In the case of buffing spells, it will always attempt to maintain them and re-apply them whenever they expire, even if it is in town. If the pet has offensive spells, it opens battle with the casting of one spell on its target, but then engages it in melee combat and will only cast another when switching targets. If the pet has crowd control spells, it uses it periodically in combat, even if against single targets. If it has healing spells, it will cast healing spells as long as it or the player character is injured.

The pet also has an inventory system of its own, which is partially modified from the player character's own system. It can wear two rings and a necklace, but nothing other than these, for apparent reasons (though one would wonder how it wears rings).

As mentioned earlier, the pet can be fed fish (including the dog). Fish items generally alter its form to that of a creature that is seen in the dungeons.

While it is in this other form, it gains that creature's capabilities, but with much greater speed so as to match the player character's own speed. The pet will also use the default attack of this creature in place of its regular melee attacks. However, if the player had changed it to a particularly slow creature type, like a Troll, it would always be playing catch-up with the player character.

The size of the fish that is fed to the pet determines the duration of the transformation. The bigger the fish, the longer-lasting it would be. The biggest grade of fish happens to permanently convert the pet to the associated creature, which is not a decision to be made lightly as the change cannot be easily reversed. (To reverse it, the pet has to be fed another fish of the same type and grade again.)

The Pet can be set to three different behavioural modes. Defensive is the default one, and perhaps the best as the pet will attack any enemy that has attacked the pet or player character or if the player character has started attacking an enemy that has come uncomfortably close. The aggressive behaviour, like similar modes in most other action RPGs, has the pet drawing more trouble than the player would want; passive simply turns the pet into a walking trunk.

As a fighting companion, the Pet is at best decently reliable. However, the most notable talent that it has is taking whatever loot that it is carrying back to town – somehow – and selling them off. This is handiest in dungeons that disallow the creation of Town Portals (as will be described later). On the other hand, perhaps to prevent the player from taking this feature for granted, the pet takes time to perform its errands, which is usually more than a minute. If the player had been utilizing the pet as a tank in his/her tactics, this can be a problem.

LEVELS & DENIZENS:

An action RPG would not be fun if it does not have variety in its level designs to provide a fun enough experience. Fortunately, Torchlight would not disappoint – if an issue with the map system that would be described later are discounted.

All of the levels in the game occur underground, though not all of them would have an indoors feel. They are separated into tiers with their own architectural themes.

At first, there are the Ember mines that Torchlight's working population has uncovered. The player will encounter some human miners here and there, hacking away at seams of Ember despite the mines having already been infiltrated by many hostile creatures and predators, such as spiders and the bat-like Varkolyn. Ratlins also mine the Ember, but they would turn their pickaxes on any surface dwellers that encroach.

There may be a lost opportunity to make use of the machinery in the mines. There are cranes that are hoisting platforms and more than a few mine carts that could have been used for some puzzles or as combat aid, but among the mining paraphernalia, only the explosives can be used and all they do is just reveal hidden rooms – a mechanism that is also present in other forms in the other tiers of the dungeons levels.

Being a fantasy RPG, Torchlight has the obligatory tombs that are filled with undead. If there is anything peculiar about Torchlight's take on the abodes of the restless dead, they are quite cavernous, and apparently more designed towards purposes of archiving than entombing cadavers. These are the levels that introduce the player to levers and hidden rooms, as well as bridges that have to be activated via switches.

One would wonder how Runic Games can incorporate aesthetic variety into its levels when all of them are set underground. Apparently, it still can, by taking inspiration from fiction like Journey to the Center of the Earth. The player will be visiting the ruins of civilizations that once existed under the sky for reasons that will not be told here for fear of spoilers. However, it can be said here that the magical and mineral nature of Ember makes for a fantastic excuse.

Of course, said ruins of civilizations have to be populated by either savages that are degenerated descendants of their ancestors or unimaginably ancient but deluded survivors, both of which are irreconcilably hostile.

The other strata of the dungeons would not be described here, as such mentions would be spoilers. It should suffice to say that they are functionally sound and that they introduce surprises at a rate that should be pleasantly manageable to most.

Levels that had been explored earlier in the main dungeon eventually reset, changing its maps, treasures and distribution of mobs. This means that a player can return to these levels to plough through them with a relatively overpowered character, if only to farm some more experience points. The game does apply a penalty to the experience gains if the level difference between the player character and the mobs of enemies is too vast though.

The main dungeon has a system of waypoints that allows the player to re-enter certain levels. However, there is little reason to backtrack, considering the progress-saving system that the game has, which will be described later.

If there is a complaint with the designs of the denizens of the dungeon levels, it is that there is a lost opportunity to introduce an ecosystem of sorts that have them fighting each other. Torchlight, like so many other action RPGs before it, has everything and everyone that are not NPCs or player characters in the dungeons being united in their desire to murder the player character and his/her pet.

PHASE & QUEST DUNGEONS:

The levels in the main dungeon are not the only ones to be had. Throughout the main dungeon, the player may discover creatures whose models are translucent yet colourful; they are called "Phase Beasts". When slain, they create portals into "bonus dungeons" that are separate from the main dungeon.

The only hints that the player has about what these levels would be like are the archetype of creature that the Phase Beasts are and their level.

These "phase dungeons", for lack of a better word to describe them, often starts the player character a bit too close to a massive mob that is led by a boss creature. This can be a very unpleasant surprise, which detracts from the fun that the player can have from these dungeons. Town portals also cannot be created in these dungeons.

However, phase dungeons tend to be very short and filled with a disproportionately higher amount of loot (and monsters), so they can be lucrative to skilled players that are short on time.

The entry portals of phase dungeons happen to be two-way and will persist until the player reaches their terminating portals. This allows a player to backtrack to get more supplies and perhaps even try the phase dungeon later when his/her player character is more powerful. However, the portals will disappear if the main dungeon level that they are in resets.

Quest dungeons are created by one particular NPC by the (perhaps appropriate) name of "Hatch". He sends the player on a quest to retrieve some MacGufiin, which is usually located in a dungeon with a few levels to it. Like the phase dungeon, town portals cannot be created in it, but the entry portal remains until the player completes the quest to retrieve the objective. Quest dungeons are tamer affairs than phase dungeons.

Another NPC in the town gives fetch quests that when completed, reward the player with "mysterious maps". These create portals to specially designed dungeons that have puzzles in them that take a little brainpower to solve. The rewards for coming up with the solutions are, of course, mobs of powerful monsters. However, there are more lucrative rewards at the end that are worth the player's time.

PORTAL MAP DUNGEONS:

There are also dungeons that can be generated using maps that create portals that lead into randomly generated dungeons. These are generally only available through a certain vendor and are often a bit expensive.

Every portal map has a range of levels and level theme. The level theme will give the player a general idea of what dangers to expect, while the range of levels determine the levels of the enemies that the player would face.

Generally, it is best to go with portal maps that has the player character's level falling within their range. If this is the case, the quality of the level and the level of the enemies will match the player character's, thus making for a suitable challenge.

However, the game does not inform the player of the consequences of using portal maps with mismatching levels. A player that is not aware of these are likely to learn about them in unpleasant ways.

If the player uses a supposedly under-levelled portal map, he/she will discover that the enemies in the dungeon that it creates are of the same level as the player character anyway. More importantly, the loot is not of matching quality. This discourages attempts to exploit lower-levelled portal maps.

If the player uses a portal map with higher level ranges, he/she can of course expect that the enemies in the dungeon that it creates to be far more powerful. Unfortunately, the quality of the loot only matches the current level of the player character. Again, such non-commensurate rewards discourage attempts to exploit these portal maps.

Like the previous kinds of special dungeons, portal dungeons disallow the player from creating Town Portals.

SHADOW VAULT:

After finishing the main plot of the game, the player gains access to an alternative dungeon that can be accessed by any player character afterwards, which is interesting as end-game content tends to be reserved for player characters that have completed the main game in other action RPGs.

This alternative dungeon, called the "Shadow Vault", works much like the main dungeon, e.g. Town Portals can be created in them. However, the similarity ends here.

The dungeon is practically endless. Each level is also randomly generated and does not follow any system of tiers. The Shadow Vault also does not have a waypoint system. Most importantly, upon generation, any level in the Shadow Vault will have its denizens and loot equivalent in level to the player character.

All these traits mean that even if the player has gone through hundreds of levels through the Shadow Vault, his/her progress is merely in the form of a number. Any previous levels will have been left behind for a long time and will be removed from the player character's save-file, only to be re-generated if the player chooses to play through them again, which will be an experience that is not different from going any deeper into the Shadow Vault.

However, romps through the Shadow Vault are the most reliable way for the player to increase the level of the player character to sheer numbers, if the player is inclined to do so. Although the player can use the portal maps too, the convenience of being able to create Town Portals in the Shadow Vault makes the Shadow Vault the wiser choice.

ENEMY DESIGNS:

At first, most of the enemies that the player would fight appear to be push-overs. Then, nastier ones start to appear among them.

These more special enemies would not be a surprise to veterans of action RPGs, because they happen to be familiar archetypes of enemies. There are huge, slow-moving brutes that are best engaged at range or kited, mages that resurrect enemies, healers that restore the health of allies, enemies that breathe fire or worse and plenty of spell-casters, some of which have annoying de-buffs.

Most enemies can be lured over away from other groups with ranged attacks, but if they happen to be in tight bunches, the player could lure entire bunches instead, which can be undesirable. Still, drawing aggro in such a manner is still a viable divide-and-conquer tactic.

However, quite a sizable proportion of enemies in this game is not already in the levels that they would spawn into. More often than not, the player will run into ambushes and traps that inject quite a lot of enemies into the level, sometimes in the immediate area. Other traps actually spawn them farther away, but inexorably moving down a chokepoint that the player character must pass through.

Overall, the types of enemies in Torchlight are quite well-designed and balanced – perhaps except for one.

DARK ZEALOTS:

This review might not have described any particular monster in significant detail for reasons of brevity and fear of spoilers, but one of them has to be mentioned for the unfortunate reason that it was dubiously designed.

The Dark Zealots are the females of a certain race of affably evil humanoids that are encountered late into the game. As spellcasters and summoners, they already have many abilities that can be quite troublesome. However, their most powerful and most contentious attacks are their lightning bolts.

Although purist players of the game have argued that these attacks can be avoided or prepared against, they are seen by detractors as devastatingly overpowered, even at the easiest difficulty settings.

Their version history has to be mentioned here. Initially, the Dark Zealot's red lightning bolts inflicted damage in the early versions of the game. A later patch introduced a bug to them, causing them to fail. A yet later patch returned their damage-inflicting properties, but the bolts did far more damage than they initially had.

Unfortunately, this was the very last patch for Torchlight, before Runic Games practically switched their efforts over to working on the sequel and left technical support to the modding community.

Applying a community mod would pare down the lethality of the Dark Zealot's lightning bolts, but it would not take away the figurative bad taste in the mouth that suggested that Runic Games has practically lost interest in its very first game.

(In fact, after the release of the sequel, Runic Games announced that it would be leaving the Torchlight franchise on the shelf.)

THE TOWN & STASHES:

The obligatory town of action RPGs in Torchlight has the usual obligatory NPCs that sell items and such. There are not any designs that are worth noting because they are refreshing.

However, a few peculiarities have to be mentioned here. The NPCs are distributed throughout the sizable town, usually at believable locations, such as the blacksmith who stands outside his metalworking shop. On the other hand, as to be expected of vendor NPCs, they stand about waiting for their only customers, the player characters.

Also, there is not any NPC that repairs things, which is understandable considering that there is no system of durability, which in hindsight, is little more than gold-sinking anti-inflation designs in RPGs. This can be pleasant to players who are tired of such bothersome mechanics.

Perhaps the most common reason for the player to return to the Town from the dungeons is to access and store things in the two stashes that are available to a player character.

The more important stash is the one that is shared by all player characters. This allows the player to store particularly powerful pieces of gear that a player character no longer uses for the other player characters to use.

However, the shared stash can be abused to give fledgling characters an imbalanced edge. To be specific, gems are the only items in the game that can be used without any prerequisites: they can be inserted into any socket on an item of any level. Thus, unscrupulous players may be able to accumulate and improve gems so as to make them available to low-level characters.

HOTKEY BAR:

Torchlight's system for the hotkey bar, which is a user interface design that is quite common in decent action RPGs in the present day, can take a bit getting used to. Instead of the usual drag-&-drop or assigning system that requires the player to bring up the inventory screen/tab, the player needs to left-click on a hotkey slot to bring up a window that shows the icons of the skills, spells and items that can be assigned to the slot. In order to use the assigned thing without using the keyboard, the player merely has to right-click on the slot.

If the player does not like to muck around with the inventory screen when assigning things to hotkeys, this system can seem very convenient.

However, although the window does show the tooltip descriptions of the things that the player can assign to a slot, it does not show the amount left for consumable items that can be assigned to hotkeys; the player has to bring up the inventory screen for that.

PROGRESS-SAVING & HARDCORE SETTING:

Each player character has a save-file. It records his/her rise through the character levels, gathering of loot and progress through the various dungeons. For better or worse, it is not located in the installation directory of the game, but rather in the system partition. This location is also used for mods, which will be described later. Anyway, this save-file is updated whenever the player exits a game session with the player character.

This save-file is what the hardcore difficulty option will interact with. If the player has picked the hardcore option when picking the difficulty settings for a new player character, then he/she will have to be careful enough to prevent the player character from dying, which is permanent. The save-file will be altered so as to make the player character unusable, thus causing the player to lose any progress that he/she has made and any gear that is on the player character's person.

There is not much of any reward for having played the game with the Hardcore option turned on, other than bragging rights.

DIFFICULTY SETTINGS:

As part of the creation of a player character, the player can select the difficulty setting for the challenges ahead. Outside of dubious means to alter save-files, this is an irreversible decision. The player can also turn on the Hardcore option, which has been described earlier, during this screen. If he/she does not, death is but a mere inconvenience to player characters that have been slain, who can be resurrected for fees.

The difficulty settings would not have any effects that seem refreshing; they do the usual alteration of the ratios of damage inflicted and damage incurred by the player character, adjustments of the health ratings of monsters and such. Regardless, they still affect the level of challenge of the game in understandable ways.

RETIRING CHARACTERS:

There is a minor but very peculiar feature of Torchlight that makes it different from many other action RPGs. In fact, it is a rather rare feature, if it had been featured in any other action RPG at all.

Characters that have achieved level 30 or higher will notice that a new NPC has appeared in town. This is the person that allows the player character to "retire", effectively rendering the player character unusable.

The benefit to this is that the player can pick one item – either a piece of armor or a weapon - to be anointed into an "heirloom" item. The name of the player character to be retired is appended to the name for the item, while its statistics are slightly improved. The level pre-requisite for the item is increased slightly as well.

This heirloom item will appear in the inventory of the next player character to be created and can be in turn handed down to the next character again if this one is retired too.

WRITING:

Despite its deceptively cartoonish artstyle, Torchlight actually has a brooding storyline, if its backstory does not suggest already.

Although the player characters' names are inconsequential and there is not a single story-centric decision that the player can make in Torchlight, Runic Games has created a backstory for each of them and did not hesitate to mention this with a voiced-over monologue every time the player creates a new character for a new playthrough.

Each class has his/her own motivation for having come to Torchlight, and it so happens that this motivation fits quite well with the rampage that they will commit as they travel deeper into the dungeons underneath Torchlight. For example, the Destroyer is a fatalistic person that ever seeks battle, whereas the Alchemist certainly does not hide his intention to study the Ember.

Most of the NPCs in the town may have names and personalities of their own, but they have little more significance to the story than being mere vendors. This is a bit of a lost opportunity, as some of them appear to be not human, yet there is little if any backstory on their races.

The antagonists and supporting characters are the ones who get the bulk of the writing effort, and they happen to be very few. Syl, who is a skilled student of the magical arts, will be the one providing most of the direction for the story and guidance for the player characters. Her personal reservations about having to go against someone that she had respect for make up half of the emotional drama in the game.

The other half is provided by one of the narrators of the game, who also happens to be a deuteragonist. His monologues, which are made via journal entries, show his descent from a wise academician to a megalomaniacal villain as he pries the terrible secrets underneath Torchlight.

Unfortunately, the climax can seem a bit clichéd to people who are experienced with action RPGs. There can only be so many ancient evils to be stopped before they start to become stale.

The labels for the items in the game may use words that only players with trivial knowledge of the Metal and Middle Ages would recognize. To cite some examples, there is a type of belts that is called the "balteus" (a belt that is designed to hold a sword), and a type of footwear that is called the "solleret" (overlapping metal plates for the feet). Fortunately, the game does mention the category of items that they belong to, so players without said knowledge would not be too left out.

MODS & MULTIPLAYER:

Runic Games has intended Torchlight to be a single-player game, with an MMO version to be made later – though plans for that have been cancelled. Despite the various promotional art for the game that shows the three player characters together, the vanilla version of the game is single-player only.

However, Runic Games has designed their game to be quite modular, allowing for many modifications – provided that interested modders learn about how to make use of the data files. Runic Games also appears to provide technical support when they can, though players will have to make use of their forums.

One of these mods happen to include a multiplayer tool that allows players to set up host sessions. However, as mods are not part and parcel of the product that is vanilla Torchlight, they will not be elaborated any further.

GRAPHICS - ITEMS:

The game makes use of color-coding for the icons of the items, specifically their backgrounds. This is usually convenient, but a problem may arise if the player character does not meet the prerequisites to use items. The backgrounds of these items appear to absorb a hue of red from the bottom, sometimes in odd and often non-uniform color mixes. Eventually, the player would learn that items with messy-looking background colors cannot be used by his/her player character.

The models for weapons and armor pieces resemble the artwork on their icons. There are several noticeable templates of models for these items, but various clusters of polygons on them have so many permutations such that not one magical item would look like another. Regular items can look like each other of course.

This variation in the models for weapons and armor means that not one player character would look like another, barring sheer chance or outright duplication of player characters. This is handy in multiplayer mods, in which players may use characters of the same class.

Another consequence is that it is not uncommon for a player character to have gear pieces with visual themes that mismatch with each other, thus resulting in silly appearances. In particular, the separation of shoulder plates from chest armor adds to the amusingly unsightly permutations of gear that player characters can sport. This is not necessarily bad of course, depending on the beholder.

There are different sets of inventory icons and in-game models for armor pieces for the different classes. For example, a player that is rolling a Destroyer may see a breastplate as having rather wide torso regions, whereas the Vanquisher would see an armored corset. These differences are just for cosmetic effect of course, but they are a nice little touch.

GRAPHICS – GEM GRADES:

There are several grades of gems, and these grades can be examined through their tooltips. However, the visual indicators for grades are terribly inadequate.

Every pair of subsequent grades shares the same icon. The next icon in the progression of grades is not any better either, as the differences are so little. All of the icons for the different grades are also of the same size.

This can make sorting out gems quite a chore. Mods with much bigger icons for the gems solve this issue, but it is still a wonder how Runic Games has not realized this problem when implementing the artwork for the icons of gems.

GRAPHICS – SPELL ICONS:

There was a system to associate colours for three (now-defunct) categories of spells. This colour system can be seen in the motifs at two of the corners of the icon for a spell. These motifs can be difficult to see, as the icons are quite small and the artwork in the center of the icons captures the attention of the viewer more than the motifs do.

This is perhaps just as well, as this colour system no longer applies in the final build of the game. If the player wants to be informed of the categorization of spells, he/she will need to look at the tooltip that appears when he/she places the mouse cursor over a spell icon. The motifs may be the remains of an overhaul during the development of this game.

CHARACTER MODELS:

The models for characters and monsters are perhaps the least impressive elements in the game's graphical designs. They are composed of noticeably edgy polygons, with features such as faces simply being static textures that were draped over said polygons.

Runic Games has invested effort into creating many models of monsters and the animations for them, but the myriad of models suffer from the same dated look. Speaking of animations, what animations there are happen to be simple-looking and far from impressive, but are adequate and believable enough.

PARTICLE EFFECTS & TEXT-BASED VISUAL AIDS:

Expectedly for a game of its time, most of the particle effects in Torchlight are invested in the spells and skills that the player will see in the game.

Generally, skills often have swirls of colour and shockwaves accompanying their use; they may also apply brilliant decals on the ground and walls, in the case of the Destroyer's pounding attacks. The use of spells is accompanied by bursts of color, sparks and/or magical dust spraying about, so there is a visual contrast between spells and skills. This is of not much use when the player is playing alone, but it might be handy in multiplayer mods where players need to keep track of each other.

If the player lands attacks on enemies with resistances or defences that greatly reduce the damage that the attacks could have inflicted, the text "Glancing Blow!" appears on top of said enemies. The game will explain that Glancing Blows are practically hits made with underpowered weapons, so it is a none-too-subtle hint that it is in the player's interest to obtain better weapons.

Similarly, the text "Critical Hit!" appears whenever the player character gets lucky with an attack. This visual indicator is only there for embellishment of course.

GRAPHICS - LEVELS:

The effect of the edgy polygons are less noticeable in the designs of the environments in the game, if only because edges are expected from them.

That said, they have plenty of edges indeed. To cite some examples, the mines of Torchlight have plenty of mineral seams and deposits jutting out from exposed earth. The archives/catacombs that are underneath the mines make use of edges to portray their bookshelves and tombs.

The level of detail in the dungeons of Torchlight is bolstered further with the inclusion of doodads, such as candles, tables and other objects as thematically appropriate.

In fact, one can argue that the dungeons of Torchlight are the best-looking things in the game.

The environments in the dungeons can obstruct the player's view of the action, so, fortunately, there are precautions that Runic Games has taken to allay this issue. They are not comprehensive, however.

Models that are behind obstacles appear as coloured silhouettes. For the player character and allies (including the pet), they are coloured light blue, whereas enemies are coloured red. This is handy if the player wants to know where they are relative to each other.

However, models for environmental objects and area boundaries that can block the movement of player characters are not coloured at all, which can make navigation a slight nuisance if walls in the foreground are blocking the view of the player's path. The player can rotate the camera of course, but this is still a hassle.

MAP DISPLAY:

Unfortunately, even though it would appear that Runic Games has picked up on a lot of good designs that had been seen in other action RPGs, it was not aware of each and every one of them. One of these that the developer does not know of is a dedicated map screen.

Therefore, the player has to resort to either the mini-map or the translucent map overlay to navigate around the current level, both of which does not show the full map of said level in high contrast. At least they can be toggled about quickly, but they are still nowhere near a full-screen map.

Again, it is left to modders to compensate for Runic Games' oversight.

LIGHTING & SHADOWING:

The lighting and shadowing effects in this game are nothing impressive. They have been designed with DirectX 9.0 graphics after all, which are already dated by the time of this game. Most of the lighting effects in the game are static, and shadows are really little more than texture-shading blobs that follow models around.

SOUND DESIGNS:

The sounds that the player will listen to the most are the sounds of combat, namely those that are associated with the methods that the player characters use to dish out the hurt. Meaty strikes accompany the Destroyer's heavy-handed attacks, loud discharges follow the Vanquisher's gunshots and the Alchemist has an aurally interesting blend of the usual noises associated with spell-casting and the hissing and clanking of steampunk technology.

Enemies also have sound effects of their own, which make it easier to know which ones are attacking if the player is not looking directly at them.

Most of the non-repeating voice-overs in the game are provided by Syl and her wayward mentor, which practically makes them the most fleshed-out characters in the game. Most of the other voice-overs in the game are there for informative purposes, such as the utterances that player characters make, or cosmetic reasons, such as the greetings and well-wishing that NPCs in the town make.

Most of the music in Torchlight is forlorn, ominous or a mixture of both. It would be familiar to people that have played the Diablo titles and other action RPGs with similar grimness. The music may clash aesthetically with the cartoonish visuals of the game in the eyes of some, however.

CONCLUSION:

Torchlight does not exactly do anything that is refreshingly new. However, what it does do is taking many splendid elements that had been seen in other action RPGs and combining them into a package that is almost thoroughly pleasant to play with. There are minor hiccups and lost opportunities to make the game even better, which is unfortunate, but Runic Games' decision to make the game highly modular did allow for many fan-made solutions.